(Above: cakes gone wrong. More cakes gone wrong here. Consider it a metaphor for life, or perhaps a commentary on commentariat columnists, seeing as how it's a by-product of that bastion of liberalism, the New York Times. Registration might be required, but I can never tell because as a kleptomaniac in search of content I've registered).
Sad to say, Janet Albrechtsen isn't that good on television. She's a little nervy and comes across as a little too high strung.
Don't believe me? Check out her performance on last week's Q & A.
For those who can't be bothered, here she is in her finery:
Along the way, you might get a little too much information, even for a dedicated tracker of the commentariat. When the subject of the Hey Hey blackface skit came up, Albrechtsen made this confession:
TONY JONES: Janet Albrechtsen, let's hear you on the original question, which is about what happened last night on Hey Hey It's Saturday.
JANET ALBRECHTSEN: Well, I have to admit, I didn't watch it because the only TV I watch is on the ABC but you can find - you can find a lot of comedy on the ABC, too. I have, of course, seen it since it played last night and I agree with Todd, the worst thing was that it wasn't funny.
Well of course she has a professional excuse, seeing as how she's on the board of the ABC, but I have a sense it's part of a deeper, darker part of a malaise - this rejection of commercial television - which also helps explain Gerard Henderson's obsessive watching of the ABC.
You see, it's not just a desire to detect pulsating pusillanimous liberals and furtive leftie academics lurking on the idiot box, it's also a dislike of advertising. Yep, these free marketeers can't stand the eau de cologne, the essence of capitalism. The spruikers.
Because on the Q & A, Albrechtsen was in company with Todd Sampson, CEO of Leo Burnett Advertising and star of the ABC's take on advertising, The Gruen Transfer (talk about incest), and in terms of audience sympathy, she came off second best.
What to do? Well what else but to do a payback in print, perhaps after a few days of brooding over the indignity of it all. And what better way to deliver the payback than sink the slipper into these fast talking, clever dick snake oil salesmen that are at the forefront of capitalism, by mounting an all out dismissal of the breed, best done by associating them with dastardly, slick, wily lefties.
Here's how she cranks it up in her column Human rights platitudes:
The Left has a gift for using clever language to push its causes. The trick is to start with a literal truth, a platitude so steeped in emotion it tugs on the heartstrings of human nature, something that just about every sane person will agree on. But what makes the use of a literal truth so seductive is the way it is used to hide a substantive untruth. A bit of intellectual rigour lifts the cloak on these dishonest word games. Just a few quick examples before we move to something far more serious.
Ah yes, those tricky bloody lefties. Sorry, advertising types. Please, do go on:
Last Thursday evening I was a panellist on ABC1’s Q&A program. On the left side sat Todd Sampson, a successful advertising executive who appears on The Gruen Transfer, also on the ABC. Like any good advertising executive, Sampson, who is also the co-creator of Earth Hour, knows how to use an emotional platitude to get a response.
When the emissions trading system came up for discussion, he said that “we care” about the environment so “we want to lead” the way in Copenhagen. He gave politicians a serve. People wanted them to “do something”, he said.
The audience cheered. These are the kind of sentimental platitudes more at home with a wide-eyed teenage girl who has just finished reading The Catcher in the Rye.
When the emissions trading system came up for discussion, he said that “we care” about the environment so “we want to lead” the way in Copenhagen. He gave politicians a serve. People wanted them to “do something”, he said.
The audience cheered. These are the kind of sentimental platitudes more at home with a wide-eyed teenage girl who has just finished reading The Catcher in the Rye.
Ouch and miaow. Those bloody advertising types, they'd sell you anything, even your own grandmother.
Well I'm not so sure about The Catcher in the Rye for girls - what about My Friend Flicka? - but I guess if you're going to diss advertising, you might as well diss a good book while you're at it, by saying it's the home of emotional platitudes (in much the same way as I've always thought of Shakespeare as containing toxic platitudinous humanistic nonsense).
Look at how Sampson cleverly uses a literal truth to convey a substantive untruth. The literal truth that “we care” about the environment is used like a bait. If you accept that bait, then maybe you will swallow the rest of what he says, hook, line and sinker. It is true that people care about the environment. The substantive untruth is that Australia should be out in front, leading the world on climate change with ambitious targets to reduce emissions.
Sampson’s substantive untruth is clear enough. Just ask a coalminer in the NSW Hunter Valley who may lose his job to a scheme that will make no difference to global warming whether he thinks Australia should lead the way on climate change.
Well actually if you can be bothered to look up the transcript, Sampson was open to the possibility of using nuclear energy, and perhaps even giving those Hunter Valley folk training in running a nuclear power plant so that they too could become as skilled in futuristic technology as Homer Simpson or the average North Korean.
No, there was something vituperative about Albrechtsen's payback, clothed as it was in the sneer that he was a successful advertising executive and like any good advertising executive, he was adept at using emotional platitudes to get a response.
How else to explain a bitchy response that would see him dismissed as selling sentimental platitudes to wide-eyed teenage girls? By using hooks, and baits and sinkers, with wide-eyed consumers as suckers and mugs and pie-eaters.
Perhaps the only worse crime for a guy who could woo the audience away from Albrechtsen - because frankly he has more personal charm and better presentation skills, as you'd hope in an advertising executive - is if he'd been a charming academic, complete with leather elbow patches on his suede jacket.
Anyhoo, Sampson needn't feel that upset, because he's in jolly good company. The Nobel Peace Prize to Obama is also presented by Albrechtsen as emotional but intellectually vacuous - you know, in the way that advertising, the wellspring of selling in capitalism, is designed to encourage hope, tugging at the heart, sprouting cliches and cultivating a wretched teenage girl-like infatuation with an idol walking on clay feet (or some such cliche).
So when Albrechtsen moves on to that Jesuit Frank Brennan and his report on a federal human rights act, you know that it will represent everything that's wrong with advertising in Australia.
It'll be a con, a seductive word game, full of blatant falsehoods, and emotional calls which are a deliberate ruse. Seductive and deceptive arguments that will be rooted out, recalcitrant rubbish grubbed out of the ground by a rigorously intellectual Albrechtsen.
Well if you aren't already familiar with Albrechtsen and her views on a HRA, feel free to toddle off and get another shot.
Sad to say, I got distracted by this side issue of advertising. I don't mind a well made commercial. It's a real art to pack a message into thirty seconds or a minute. Not that I'm saying a well made ad makes me buy anything. Heck no, I apply rigorous intellectual analysis to ads and to anything I buy (misty eyed, let me pause to mutter, zoom zoooom). And lordy don't imagine I watch commercial television, except when they present an hour of commercials as progaming, complete with thirteen or so minutes of advertising in between the advertising.
That said - to reassure those who hate capitalism and never buy anything - I can't see that much difference between the kind of emotional platitudinous commercial presentation Albrechtsen denounces, and the jeremiads against the modern world she regularly mounts like some mountebank Samuel Richardson seeking to write a new Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded.
Except that the ads are invariably shorter, often cleverer, frequently more punchy, reliably more humorous, and always to the point.
You see, I reckon if the ABC maintained its status as an advertising free zone (and got rid of all those dreadful self-promotional commercials and spruiking for ABC product in ABC shops), and yet at the same time, made a shift to the right (with only a few token lefties allowed as window dressing), a lot of commentariat columnists would never again partake of popular culture or commercial television, or ... gasp ... advertising.
It's a funny old world isn't it, where the fruits of capitalism - 24/7 opportunities to watch MacGyver and television commercials - has become the object of disdain for the intellectually rigorous.
Well I think we'll soon be needing an HRA to protect advertising executives - and perhaps even capitalism itself - from dedicated ABC watchers like Henderson and Albrechtsen ...
I know, I know, that's a platitude steeped in human emotion, a seductive dishonest word game, but lordy won't someone stand up for the people who gave us jingles as a way forward? After all, the cats of Australia have already made their choice ...
(Below: and now, as a bonus - couldn't let you go without a bonus, sorry the samples and the steak knives have run out - a couple more images of cakes gone wrong, the first of an existential kind, the second an Obama sporting crisis perhaps arising from Chicago?)
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